Living Future Strategies

Geoversiv Living Future Strategies are based on critical path reasoning.

The ‘Critical Path’ was the complex evolutionary pattern of challenge, insight, and discovery, that would lead to NASA eventually landing a human being on the Moon and bringing him safely back to Earth. It is estimated that the full Critical Path involved roughly 2 million discoveries, proofs and achievements that had to be achieved, in parallel and in sequence, before lift-off. In 1961, when Pres. Kennedy announced his plan to go to the Moon and back, about half of these critical path tasks were yet to be achieved.

Geoversiv thinking is based on the knowledge that we can harness more of what is around us to act more efficiently in the world, to achieve more with less, and to prosper while reducing the harm we cause to the complex ecological systems that support and sustain life.

Geoversiv’s main program, ACCESS to GOOD, is a global pathway visualization and enhancement project. It operates as an open, collaborative, reporting process, evolving and adapting over time, with the aim of identifying levers of action for adding value, momentum, and scope to investments in climate action and resilient human development.

Our Peace Synapse Climate Security Graph is another project in global pathway visualization and enhancement. By visualizing the landscape of knowledge connections between individuals, institutions, crisis situations and response scenarios, we aim to achieve a more efficient process of knowledge enhancement and information-sharing, oriented toward generative future outcomes.

There are three main Geoversiv variations on critical pathways planning:

Tracing Macrocritical Economic Trends

Mapping Generative Future Priorities

Redesigning Future Operational Value

Learn more about each below, and use this form to inquire about how to use these projects to benefit your institution or enterprise.

Level 1: Tracing Macrocritical Economic Trends

The term ‘macrocritical’ refers to anything that affects the overall size, shape and health of the economy, but which is not necessarily priced in the marketplace.

Climate change is a macrocritical influence, because it drains and degrades value everywhere.

Gender equality and education access are also macrocritical influences, because we know that a nation that systematically mistreats or undereducates girls is more likely than a similar country that does not to descend into violent conflict.

The resilience of bee populations, soil carbon richness, the stability of rainfall patterns, and everyday affordable access to digital information flows, also show macrocritical impacts.

To help move the world collectively toward a macrocritically resilient future, our Living Future Strategies work starts with tracing macrocritical economic trends. This added insight can help an institution, a business, or a nation, think more constructively about where future value resides, and how to ensure it is secured and allowed to grow.

Level 2: Mapping Generative Future Priorities

‘Generativity’ is a measure of how a given activity works to shore up and expand the base of resources and capabilities on which everyday economic value operates.

Investment in solar energy is generative, because it expands the volume of the resource in question.

Combustion of carbon-based molecules is degenerative, because it depletes the volume of the resource in question.

A knowledge economy is more resilient, adaptive, and universally valuable than a mineral-extraction economy, because knowledge can always expand, whereas minerals are a finite resource.

Taking a macrocritical approach to non-monetary value depleted or value added, we can assess the generative economic value of different kinds of investment, development, enterprise, and policy-making. By mapping generative future priorities, we aim to achieve new awareness about how next-step investments and over-the-horizon planning can allow an institution, business, or government, to better adapt to future needs, and be positioned to thrive reliably in the new economy.

Level 3: Redesigning Future Operational Value

The highest level of our Living Future Strategies work is the operational redesign of an institution’s approach to future value. Here, we are taking a detailed view of macrocritical influences and generative priorities to develop critical pathway planning for full-spectrum transition to macrocritical resilience and organic-adaptive innovation.

For a company whose business model depends for 99% of its revenue on production of combustible carbon-based fuels—for instance—future operational value will fade without rapid and regular business-model innovation.

Investing in new technology is not enough, because the optimal value-generating business model for distributed renewable energy generation is structurally and operationally very different from the heavy and hierarchical structure that lets big oil and gas companies thrive.

For towns and regions used to an extractive economy, breaking out of the boom-bust cycle is about how future value is operationalized day to day. A new organic interaction with everyday economic value generation is needed.

Learn more

In each of our Living Future Strategies projects, we focus on providing the best quality information, in the most condensed form possible, with the granular detail and local relevance required to make sure forward-looking sustainable thinking can be of most use to you and your team, institution or community.